(December 2003) — This season, present the new anthology In Praise of Fertile Land — or the colorful environmental coupon Chinook Book — in a Farmland Fund tote. Write your message on a postcard photo of the Delta Farm.

Honor friends and family with a gift to the Fund in their name. We'll let them know with a copy of the card shown below (green and brown ink on cream card stock). Tell us what you'd like written inside.

Dedicate a "Protection Share" in our Delta Farm — an "investment" in land, farmhouse, barn, outbuildings, the orchard or individual fruit trees. Stakeholders receive certificates on fine paper with a green ribbon and gold seal. Your name and the names of those you honor or remember will be inscribed on permanent plaques attached to the barn.

Sunfield raises the match

Farmland Fund check presented

As Sunfield opened doors to their five-course Italian dinner and silent auction at the Port Townsend Palindrome on October 4, the Waldorf school community was $3,400 short of the $15,000 they needed to earn the Farmland Fund's $10,000 challenge grant.

Volunteers had worked the previous day and from early that morning preparing food now served by young people to the tune of local musicians — concertina, fiddle and Italian opera. Between the second and third courses, an anonymous donor asked what was needed and contributed the full remaining amount. The Farmland Fund's check — representing gifts from 186 donors — was handed over and then held high over a blast of joyful cheers and applause long and strong enough to blow the doors open again.

Sunfield is working to save an 83-acre farm near Hadlock by raising $400,000 by February 2004. For more information about how you can help with their Land for Learning project, call 360-385-5885.

Bread is the warmest,
kindest of words.
Write it always with a capital letter,
like your own name.— Russian cafe sign

From the anthology In Praise of Fertile Land (Whit Press, 2003), winner of the 2003 Bumbershoot Literary Award. All proceeds from copies sold in PCC Natural Markets benefit the Farmland Fund. Your purchase of a copy will save about the same amount of farmland as the size of the book.